Love

11th grade was, up to that point, the best year in my life. This happiness can be attributed to the fact that I was in love, a feeling that made me see the world through rose tinted glasses – and it was beautiful. I met Cheri through one of the least likely places to meet women; the Science Olympiad team. She was truly everything that I wanted; much smarter than me, beautiful, and caring. Cheri’s parents didn’t allow her to date guys, so our relationship was effectively hidden from them. We spent a great deal of time with each other – during school, after school, when we had a few hours between the end of school and when her dad picked her up, and we talked nightly on the phone. (An amusing aside – we would fall asleep with the phone still on, which angered my dad, since he had to pay for the minutes I used.)

In 6th grade, I utterly feared seeing my girlfriend outside of school. In 7th grade, I was too scared to turn an online friendship into a real one. My Myers-Briggs type is INTJ, which means that I am bad at flirting and small talk (logic experts need not take offense – I am bad at flirting and small talk, which, in combination with other factors, makes me an INTJ, not the other way around). My relationship was far from being perfect. Cheri was ashamed of me, a realization that I was very slow to come by. I was, and remain, a goofy person; I enjoy making silly jokes and going off on random tangents. Although she never told me, I think that this really bothered her. Indeed, we rarely spent time with mutual friends; for example, we only went to one school dance.

To add further complications, Cheri was in love with someone else. When I was going out with her, I usually ignored this, because I felt that it was outside of my control. I knew that she loved me, and I didn’t see any way to make her stop loving the other guy except to just be myself. However, I believe that this added to the shame that she felt in dating me; I was always being compared to him, the opportunity cost of dating me under evaluation.

11th grade is on hold

Difficult memories.

Work is currently endless monotony. My boss is gone until next week, so I don't have any interesting assignments. I’m getting impact data from loan evaluations, but since my company started doing loans in the early nineties, a lot of them are only available as physical copies. This means that I have to go up stairs, get the loan evaluation from deep storage, come back down, enter the information I need, rinse, repeat. Not to mention that a lot of them don’t even have all of the information that I need. Most exciting on the work front, however, is that I am going to have lunch with a managing director of a major asset management company, which should be very cool. And they say that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I went swimming with some friends in Lake Michigan yesterday. I haven’t been swimming since the swimming test I took during the first week of my first year. It’s been a while, and I’d forgotten how much fun swimming is. Unfortunately, Lake Michigan isn’t the cleanest place to go swimming; in fact, after we swam out a bit, we decided to turn back because the smell was so bad.

Chess

In accordance with my Russian genes, I started to play competitive chess in 10th grade. My school had a chess team, and since membership was low, we were heavily subsidized to go to tournaments. To practice, I played a lot of chess on Yahoo!. One day, after playing a few games (and getting crushed) against a random player, we started talking and sent instant messages back and forth to each other over the next few days. He told me that he was a fourteen year old American named Murphy living in France and that he played competitively in European tournaments and did very well (chess tournaments have fairly substantial cash prizes for the winners). I never learned his last name but I believed him simply because he was an exceptional chess player. I watched him play at least thirty games and he never lost.

I’d been watching Murphy play chess and playing chess with him for a few hours a day for about a week when he simply disappeared. A few days later, he sent me an instant message and said that he fell on a knife and was hospitalized. A few days after that, he signed on and I asked him how he was feeling, only to receive a response in French. With the help of Babelfish, I learned that I was talking to Murphy’s French brother and that Murphy had died from his wound.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. A few days afterwards, a person identifying himself as Murphy’s father signed on and, in a mixture of French and English, explained that Murphy did not have any friends in school and that, on his deathbed, he said that he had made a friend online (me) and willed me a million euros. His father proceeded to request that I come to France for Murphy’s funeral, which I denied; after all, I didn’t know Murphy very well. So, in what probably remains the strangest thing that I have ever done online, we had a wake over instant messenger. Since then, no one has ever signed onto that screen name. Needless to say, I never received the million dollars, but it seems far too elaborate to be a scam.

Debate

During 9th grade, I started by far the most exciting and enjoyable activity for me during high school – policy debate. I was doing make-up work in one of the biology classrooms, which also happened to be the room for the debate team practices. One of my friends on the debate team invited me to join and I ended up debating for four years during high school. I was a good debater, although not very fast. Part of policy debate requires reading snippets of articles at very high speeds, which I was never very good at – I’m a naturally slow speaker. I even went to Spartan Debate Camp, Michigan State’s policy debate camp, for three summers. Sadly, I was never successful, but I’ll delve into that later.

In 10th grade, under pressure from my step-mom, my father switched universities again, from Michigan State to the University of Minnesota. The head of the math department at my new school decided to place me into Calculus, a foolish idea. I was in a class where I tried to learn material that combined the knowledge that I was supposed to have acquired over the last two years. Needless to say, Calculus was hell. To add insult to injury, my new high school did not have a policy debate team. So, I, with the experience of one year of novice debate (debate tournaments have three tiers of difficulty – novice, junior varsity, and varsity) and a summer of debate camp, decided to start one. With the aid of a teacher in lending me a classroom, I started running debate team meetings after school. To make a long story short, I did not succeed in my attempts to start a debate team at Central High School, although I did make some friends.

8th grade

You’d think that after my poor performance in 7th grade mathematics, I could go back to learning at the snail pace that I was used to. But no – urged on by my father, I went on to take accelerated math classes at Michigan State. I took geometry, trigonometry, and algebra I and II, with a semester devoted to each. I learned nothing in these classes and continued to do poorly. My dad was a constant resource in helping me with homework. I was definitely one of the poorest students in the class in terms of understanding the material and yet I never got anything less than a B-. After a while, the new assignments were simply beyond my comprehension, since I didn’t understand the previous material which they were based on.

Nothing noteworthy happened during 8th grade in terms of education. Nevertheless, excitement found me. One day, I was home alone and I heard the sound of dishes breaking in the apartment next to ours. At first, I ignored the sound; after all, dishes do break accidentally. However, it soon became abundantly clear that the person in that apartment was breaking every single thing he could get his hands on and screaming at the top of his lungs. I became slightly more worried. In the next ten minutes, the sounds didn’t stop, although my parents did come home and were just as concerned as I was. Suddenly, a completely naked black man ran out of the apartment with a broom handle, and proceeded to run down the row of apartments, hitting all of the windows he could reach (he cracked ours). I called 911 and my dad got a hammer in case he needed to defend us against the crazy naked black guy. An Asian couple was unfortunate enough to come home right after the crazy guy ran out of his apartment; he saw them, ran over, and started hitting their car and the woman with his broom handle. The Asian man started wrestling with him and my dad ran out to help him. They managed to pin the guy and by that time the police had arrived. However, the crazy black guy would not shut up. He kept screaming about how he was set up for prostitution and when it became clear to him that the police weren’t letting him go, he started singing the Star Spangled Banner – cut off when the paramedics game him a sedative. In a strange coincidence, we moved to a different apartment soon afterwards.

7th grade

I enjoyed 7th grade more than 6th grade, although I was definitely more introverted. After finishing his year at MIT, my dad moved on to Michigan State. East Lansing, Michigan is an extremely boring town. Moreover, since I had just moved there, I didn’t really have any friends. 7th grade was also the start of my mathematical suicide, something that makes me sad to this very day. Believing that I was very smart (I was), my dad decided that I should take the hardest math class my middle school had to offer, algebra, which was filled predominantly with 8th graders. The problem was that I was unused to actually doing work; I had simply never done any up to that point. Most of my time was spent reading, playing Starcraft and various MUDs (Multi-User Domains, the predecessor of the massively popular Massively Multiplayer Online games), and emailing my friends from home. I got by because the material that I was being taught was blindingly simple; I didn’t need to do anything except pay attention in class. My math class in 7th grade was different. In the face of actually working for the first time in my educational career, I crashed and burned.

As I said, I was an introverted child in 7th grade. Along these lines, I tried to find friends in the safest way possible – by emailing random people. I somehow started an email conversation with a woman named Kate. Kate was a lot older than me. She said that she was in her mid-twenties; I have no idea why she spent her time responding to emails from a 7th grader. She lived in East Lansing and we sent almost daily emails to each other. Kate was definitely real – we talked about stuff happening in the town and I remember her mentioning that she stopped by my dad’s department and saw his photo hanging on the wall.

One day, she invited me over to her house and, just like that, I stopped responding to her emails. I didn’t respond to that email, nor the emails asking me where I had gone, why I had stopped responding, and what she had done wrong. Maybe I did the right thing – maybe “Kate” was a child abductor and, had I accepted, I wouldn’t be writing this today. Or maybe she was just as lonely as I was and wanted a friend.

6th grade

If my family life was bad in 5th grade, my personal life in 6th grade was even worse. I can’t imagine how I could have possibly been tormented more than I was. I remember three names from that year; my best friend, Aaron, my girlfriend, Willa, and my bully, Sean. One of the worst things that happened a few times during the course of the year was coming to school and finding an additional lock on my locker. It wasn’t that it was difficult to remove – the janitor had some huge scissors that could easily cut through metal – but I definitely felt disliked by my peers. Halfway through the year, in my first venture into the strange world of women, I told a girl named Willa that I liked her and was pleased to hear that she felt the same about me. However, aside from going to school dances and the like, it’s not like we actually spent time together. That can be blamed on me – I didn’t want to spend any time with Willa outside of school. Even during 6th grade, I was deeply private and spent most of my free time alone. My best friend during 6th grade, Aaron, I only saw once a week. Looking back, I see nothing notable about 6th grade and I was glad when we moved to Michigan.

The divorce

5th grade was filled with drama. My father had gone to work at MIT and my mother, swamped with her own graduate work, was unable to control me. I was, to say the least, a horribly bad child. I threw temper tantrums and refused to go to school. I am not sure why I behaved that way; maybe I wanted attention or was foreshadowing the future, sort of like the animals that go nuts five minutes before an earthquake hits. Either way, it was too much for my mother, so she sent me to California to live with my grandparents (in the middle of 5th grade – again, Russians are weird) and proceeded to divorce my father.

The divorce of my parents could have only gotten worse if they had killed each other. In retrospect, I probably made it more difficult; I absolutely refused to choose between either parent, presumably to the glee of the lawyers. Both of my parents accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees in their custody battle. My mother, being a graduate student, ran out of money to pay her lawyers first and proceeded to argue the case herself. To make a long story short, she lost and my father obtained custody. However, legal issues like, say, having custody are no big deal for my mom – in a last ditch effort, she persuaded me to stay with her for a few months in the beginning of 6th grade to “try it out” – something that I’d already done in 5th grade, but let’s not argue semantics. In retrospect, I find this action contemptible; how did she expect me to refuse? I am reminded of the lawyers trying various ways to get me to choose between a parent, such as giving me a picture of two doghouses, one labeled “Mom” and the other “Dad” and asking me where I, the puppy, wanted to sleep for the night. The puppy slept outside.

The story has an exciting conclusion. My mom heard that my dad was coming to take me home with him and decided to hide me, Elián González style. Fortunately, I was not accosted by MP5-toting INS agents; after a few hours of staying in a friend’s house and playing computer games with him, I turned myself in to the police.

Moving to America

When I was four, my parents and my uncle moved to the US from Russia, following my grandparents, who had moved a year earlier. My grandfather, a preeminent mathematician, had a short position at Harvard before moving on to a permanent position at the University of California at Davis. I lived in Boston for a few months while my grandfather finished up his time at Harvard; then, along with my parents, I moved to California, as my father had a temporary position at UC Davis. There, I attended a Montessori school and struggled to learn English – I remember sobbing as my parents left me to fend for my own in a room full of people that did not understand a single thing I said. After kindergarten, my parents moved to Princeton, NJ, where my mother attended graduate school and my father worked (he later worked at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while my mother finished graduate school). Surprisingly, I remained in California with my grandparents until 3rd grade. This is because of a foolish Russian custom to have children early and give them away to your parents while you work. Nevertheless, I rejoined my parents after two years and attended Riverside Elementary School for 3rd, 4th, and part of 5th grade.

I’m writing this as an introduction for various secrets

As a child, I was never in one place for very long. Not because I had ADD (I did); just that my father did not receive tenure as a professor of mathematics until I was in 9th grade, meaning that my family had to move from university town to university town as he traveled the country in search of a department that would give him tenure. Hence, my friends, who have only known me as long as I’ve lived in that particular town, a period of one to three years, have a far from complete picture of my life. Nor do my parents; I’ve been living apart from them for two years now, and when I lived with them, I was not the most open of children. Finally, some of the things which have happened to me I never told to anyone simply because they never asked. I’m organizing this as my life story, with important or interesting points thrown in, along with a bit of reflection. It’s one thing to look back on one’s life, and it’s another to write in down. Enjoy.

No work at work again

My boss is on vacation until Monday, and I’ve finished all of the work that he’s assigned me. I think that he assumed that it would take me until Friday to do, but that is obviously not the case. Work is going pretty well. Everyone at my office is still awesome and I’ve enjoyed all of my assignments except for one (data entry – the most boring job in the universe).

I got a huge (free) bookcase for my room, allowing me to unpack the rest of my boxes. Now all I need is a dresser so that I can stop living out of my suitcase… but that isn’t as urgent as a bookcase, although my parents would probably disagree. Also on my list of things to buy is an Aeron chair and maybe a Maybach if I have money left over. You know, little things.